Hip Flexibility For Back Pain Relief

Thank you for tuning in for today’s livestream where we talked about hip flexibility and back pain. Understanding the role of hip flexibility is so important for resolving back pain. We’re launching a special flexibility protocol ‘bolt-on’ to our Back In Shape premium membership area soon.

When you’re going through the first phases of acute back pain, we often become quite stiff and all the stress is being put through the back. Your hip joints are strong, stable joints with a wide range of motion. The whole of the lumbar spine does not have a good range of motion, and it’s most stable in its natural lordotic position which is all too often lost in someone who has back pain. When you have an injury, neurological messages are sent to areas of the body that need to stiffen up to protect an injury. You can spend time stretching but further neurological messages will stiffen the area back up. The Phase 1 exercises in their entirety will be helping to relieve inflammation and address that feedback.

Once you’ve gone through that initial recovery, introducing strengthening will bring in progressive loading to build muscular support. Sensible loading and not uncontrolled, unregulated loading. Too much flexibility, including hypermobility, brings with it a lack of stability. If you’re focusing too much on flexibility, it’s not addressing any inflammation so your body will stiffen back up. Furthermore, if you’ve in general focused on purely flexibility when you didn’t have back pain then you’re making yourself more unstable without muscular support through any strength training.

The best way to do it is to work on basic flexibility, introduce progressive loading and then focus on more specific flexibility after you’ve made good progress with the rest of the program.